The Unknown Advisor is an investment advisory representative for a registered investment advisor in Florida. This blog is not about selling. It's about general investment information, about what has worked, over time in investing. Asset allocation, for example, has worked. Because certain things have worked, they are likely to work in the future. Feel free to email me questions.

Friday, August 24, 2007

Bloomberg's strangest headline of the day, "It's Time to Meet the Subprime Devil We Don't Know: Caroline Baum"

Is this perhaps a slightly awkward headline? I always figured she was perfectly nice. (Just kidding now.)

Seriously, she has a very substantial point: Is the lack of transparency which goes with certain investments such as some mortgage-backed securities, sufficient to make it very difficult to evaluate the risks present in the financial markets? Sufficient to render problematical proper evaluation of the risk present in heavily-leveraged, quantitatively-driven portfolios of such investments? Evidently.

Sufficient even perhaps to alter the "riskiness", i.e., volatility, of even other asset classes? In the short run, apparently. Did Stephen King ever write anything as scary as that?